421. Inauguration Day Trump-et, Gary Gulman & the New Yorker's Birthday

+ Morris gets comfortable in his new digs.

…from my temporary perch in rainy Miami, I hope you’re having a less than abjectively depressing Inauguration week!

After watching Monday’s sideshow, I decided to pull stumps from the polar vortex and do what all ageing Manhattanites do— flee to Florida. The irony of escaping to America's waiting room isn't lost on me. Down here, the only ice you'll find is keeping someone's cocktail at a civilized temperature. And really, what's more authentically New York than temporarily abandoning New York?

The inauguration speech was one for the ages. And by that, I mean it went on for fucking ages. He went next door to keep going, right after the official proceedings had concluded. Linguists will study his wayward encore rant for generations to come.* a true masterpiece of baffling non-sequiturs.

*I am, of course, kidding. There’s only one generation left. Two, tops.

This week’s Sketchbook is a sneak peek at the drawing board for my portrait of Gary Gulman (scroll down for more on the G-man.)

The Gul's unmissable new show at the Lucille Lortel Theatre is an ode to the written (and spoken) word.

There are few people other New York comics talk about with genuine reverence (mainly because comics are too busy thinking about ourselves), but in the same breath as greats like Norm, Attell, Rock, Patrice, and Burr, you'll hear us speak of The G-Man. “The Gul”. There’s a chance you might never have heard of "Criminally Underrated Comedian Gary Gulman" before, but by gum, you're gonna hear about him now.

January 20th, 2024
Greenwich Village, NY

Last night, through a whirling snowstorm that would eventually blanket New York City, I made my way to the opening night of Gary's new show at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. As is usually the case at events full of A-list celebrities, I was the guest of someone way more talented and spent much of the time trying to stop my head from swivelling off.

The show is ostensibly about Gary's love of words – his early love of books, reading, and the bottomless well of literary obsession that underlies his incredible comedic insights. He's the only comic who can dissect the abbreviations of US states with the fervour of a golden retriever who just found a wet tennis ball. (But a Golden Retriever with a Ph.D. in Literature.)

From the moment the theatre doors sealed us from the storm, Gulman took us back to his childhood in Peabody, Massachusetts, where he spent his days with raised shoulders alongside his single mother and her gaggle of Tupperware Party yentas. The story introduces us to his father, who, after leaving them at one-and-a-half, bafflingly insisted on having Gary repeat the first grade. The haunting fallout of this decision carries through the show, spawning some of the most endearing and hilarious material he's performed in his 31-year career. (And yes, to the New York comedians with therapists reading this, Alan does get a hefty shout-out.)

The audience was a murderer's row of career comedians, comedy writers, directors, and industry folk – inarguably the most challenging room in the world for a comedian. Yet, the laughs were big and many! It was like watching a magician perform in a room full of other magicians who knew all the tricks and still somehow earned a standing ovation.

Gulman peels open his chest to grapple with some of the deepest motivations for his three-decade career of transmuting pain and misfortune into laughter. This isn't just some "I'm a sad clown, please love me" festival show you stumble into off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. This is like a great novel performed live on stage by someone with such linguistic mastery that I feel like a cave troll even writing this review. (Gary would have used the word dilettante).

One of several highlights comes when he, prompted by his wife's innocent query about what song is playing on the radio, bursts into a grandiloquent lecture on the bands of the grunge era. The bit demonstrates not only his ability to wrangle words with the steady expertise of a micro-surgeon but also his unrivalled talent for diving six layers deep into esoterica with an infectious obsession that had the audience in paroxysms.

He knows how ridiculously condescending he looks, dropping esoteric references to Kant and Vonnegut and expecting the audience to catch them. His self-deprecating humour is precisely why he's able to label himself and the show with a word that few have ever heard, let alone used…

Read the rest of the post here.

100 Subway Riders, 100 Screens

Once again, the intrepid Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet had me mesmerised with her reporting from the depths of the New York subway— asking 100 subway riders what they were doing down there. I maintain that Anne’s Substack is easily one of the best New York newsletters out there— here’s a slice:

"Sometimes it's also just like a little New York moment," he said. "I remember one time I was on an E train, and the train was stopped in the station, and there was an unintelligible announcement about why we were stopped. And I looked at this guy, and I could just tell that we were both thinking the same thing. And I went 'Mph wphm mmmh!' and everyone laughed. You have these little New York moments where everybody's on the same page because we're New Yorkers. And I feel like if I have my headphones in, or if my head's down, I'm gonna miss that."

That's when it hit me. The real problem with everyone riding the subway encased in headphones and staring at their screens is not so much that we are hiding from each other as the fact that we are no longer riding together. We've somehow managed to recreate the isolated experience of driving down the highway in a car, only with garbled announcements and rats.

Read more below:

100 Subway Riders, 100 Screens

This week on Process Junkie: The curious, deceptively simple mise en place ritual of several longtime professional cartoonists…

Studio Habits: Clearing Physical Space to Make Way for Mental Space.

,,,,Aaaaand last but not least, I guest edited this week’s edition of ToonStack — The Topic du Jour: “Real Estate”. A topic close to my heart. And lower back.

You can read this week’s edition here.

Morris has co-opted my reading chair. I now rent it from him...